Disclosed herein is a system and method for augmenting data by generating a plurality of pose-altered images of an item from one or more 2D images of the item and using the augmented data to train a train a feature extractor. In other aspects of the invention, the trained feature extractor is used to enroll features extracted from images of new products in a library database of known products or to identify images of unknown products by matching features of an image of the unknown product with features stored in the library database.